LITMIR.BIZ

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trumpets had woke to life again that long feud between the Crown and the aristocracy which had marked the course of Scottish history during the two previous centuries, but which had been gradually declining since Murray scattered his sister's power to the winds at Langside.

      It would be hard, at this distance of time and without his excuse, to say in our haste with Knox that there was not one righteous man among the Lords of the Congregation who had assisted him to establish the reformed religion in Scotland; but it is certain that the large majority looked only to the fat revenues of the old Church, and remembered only her insolence in the day of her power. For a century and a half she had been enriched and strengthened by successive sovereigns as a bulwark against the fiercest and most independent aristocracy in Europe. Under James the Fifth her haughty and dissolute prelates had filled the highest offices of State, while the nobles were despoiled, imprisoned, and banished at their will. The hour of reckoning had now come, and it was to be exacted to the uttermost farthing. But though the reformers were allowed to indulge their pious zeal unchecked in the work of destruction, they were soon made aware that their dangerous allies had no mind to see a new ecclesiastical tyranny set up in the place of the old one. Within less than a year of the establishment of the reformed religion the greater part of the estates of the Catholic Church (estimated at rather more than one-third of the whole wealth of the kingdom) had passed by various and mostly violent ways into the hands of the aristocracy. This was their paramount idea of the Reformation, an idea by which they were determined to stand fast, though all the pulpits in the kingdom should cry shame on them. Murray and Morton, those strong sons of Zeruiah, treated the arguments and the anger of Knox with the same contemptuous indifference, while the astute and mocking Maitland laughed in his face at his scheme of Church government as at "a devout imagination." A miserable pittance doled out of the share of the plunder allotted to the Crown was all that the great Reformer could secure for the maintenance of his new Church. Well might he cry, in the bitterness of his disappointment, "I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided betwixt God and the devil." During Mary's short reign, and under the regents who succeeded her, the wealth and influence of the nobles had risen still higher at the expense of the Crown when not at the expense of the Church. James, on attaining his majority, had indeed done something to better the position of the former, and when more firmly seated on his throne he had done something to better the position of the latter. But, in his own homely phraseology, he knew the stomach of his people too well to put a high hand to these delicate matters. His Act of Annexation only applied to so much of the old Church lands as still remained unalienated, while it practically gave the sanction of Parliament to the titles of those on which the nobles had already laid arbitrary hands. Even of the property then resumed to the Crown he made throughout his reign many and large grants to his favourites. The tithes he did not touch, and it was by the tithes that his son's offence was to come. However much, therefore, he might exasperate the Presbyterian clergy by his Episcopalian proclivities, so long as he left the nobles' property alone he was safe. They had no particular dislike either to the office or style of bishop. With modified powers and under another name bishops had indeed formed a part of Knox's original polity; and so far as they tended to keep the clergy in order and confine them to their proper business, their restoration was not unwelcome to a considerable body outside the Church, and even to some of the less pugnacious spirits within it. All the nobles took thought for was to prevent the creation of a new spiritual aristocracy, that might come in time to be as rich and powerful as the old Catholic hierarchy they had crushed and despoiled. And of that, so long as they retained the mastery of the funds which alone could make such an aristocracy possible, they had little fear. Probably at no period since the accession of James the First had there been such peace between a Scottish king and his nobles as there was while James the Sixth sat on the English throne.

      By the Act of Revocation the scene was changed in a moment. The purpose of the Act was indeed both just and politic. Those writers who will allow no virtue in Charles may claim that his real design was but to increase the revenue and the prerogative of the Crown, and to provide funds for the complete restoration of Episcopacy in Scotland, without any thought for the interests of his oppressed subjects. But his own revenues were not increased; the prerogative of the Crown was strengthened only against an unruly and grasping aristocracy; the oppressed were relieved from a grinding tyranny equal to the worst exercise of the old feudal lordship. The right of tithe, where tithe was levied in kind, gave those who held it absolute power over those who had to pay it. It placed the small landowners and farmers, who were now gradually forming in Scotland a middle class analogous to the English yeomen, at the mercy of men who were, to say the least, not famous for exercising it. The Catholic clergy, it was declared, had been hard masters, but the little fingers of the Protestant nobles were thicker than the loins of the Catholic clergy. The tenant could not gather his harvest until the landlord had taken his tithe; and the landlord took his tithe when it pleased him, regardless of the interest or convenience of the tenant. It is not to be supposed that all landlords pushed their rights to extremities, but it is certain that there was much harsh dealing and much distress. The bare existence of such rights, moreover, was subversive of the very essence of the Constitution. They gave one class of the community despotic authority over another class, and both Crown and Parliament were as powerless to protect the latter as it was to protect itself. The duties of the sovereign, no less than the liberty of the subject, made a change imperative.

      But as usual Charles began unwisely. All Church property held by laymen, in tithe or land, was to be resumed to the Crown on the ground of illegalities in the original concession. The opposition was of course immediate and violent. It was headed by the Chancellor himself, Sir George Hay, afterwards Earl of Kinnoull, an irritable, obstinate old man, and included the greater part of the Privy Council. A deputation was sent to remonstrate with the King; reports were industriously circulated among the people that it was their religion he was really aiming at; his commissioner for carrying out the revocation was threatened with violence. For once Charles was wise with a good grace. The obnoxious Act was withdrawn and a commission known as the Commission of Surrender of Superiorities and Tithes issued in its stead. The terms on which the commissioners were empowered to treat are now unanimously allowed to have been as conciliatory and liberal as was compatible with the redress of a grievance to which sixty years of sufferance had perhaps given some title of respect. Lord Napier was one of the commissioners, and has recorded his emphatic opinion of the wisdom and justice of the scheme. He has also recorded not less emphatically the factious and dishonest nature of an opposition which was still, though less openly, maintained by the discontented nobles.[4] Simultaneously with this commission a proclamation was issued exempting from their operation all ministers who had been ordained before the Articles of Perth became law, and granting a general amnesty to all who were suffering from their transgression.

      Had Charles been content to stop here, Scotland at least could have had no quarrel with him. Even the nobles, when the first heat of their discontent had cooled, must have recognised that their property, though slightly diminished, was now secured to them by an inalienable title, and would be no longer a source of danger to themselves or to the kingdom. The tithe-payers were freed from an unjust and oppressive burden. The clergy were secured both in the receipt of their income and in what the most tolerant of them at any rate considered the reasonable exercise of their conscience. Could the King go on as he had begun, he was likely to prove the strongest and most popular ruler Scotland had known since his ancestor fell at Flodden. But when any part of the body politic is sick it needs a wise and vigorous physician to keep the infection from spreading. There was a dangerous sickness rife in England, and it was not in the interests of those who had determined on the cure to see it wrought by other means. If one-half of the kingdom were sound, it could be used as an effectual cure for the unsound half. The discontent in Scotland was therefore assiduously fomented from England; and the unfortunate King, neither wise nor vigorous himself, had in Laud an adviser whose vigour was rarely on the side of wisdom.

      Meanwhile the nobles waited. Though they could harass and delay the Tithes Commission, they were powerless to resist it seriously. The constitution of the Scottish Parliament rendered all opposition to the Crown practically useless unless it was unanimous; and they knew well that the general sympathies of the nation, lay and cleric alike, were in this case on the side of the King. But they knew also that if he made one step more along the dangerous path of religious innovation their time would come. The concession

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